IT Operations Management

Determine Enterprise Service Management (ESM) Best Practices

Best practices are defined as methods or techniques that have consistently achieved superior results when compared to other means of reaching the same goal. Eventually, when it becomes clear that a best practice is indeed a best practice, it becomes a benchmark.

We’re lucky to live in an age where we’ve determined many best practices, including for enterprise service management. Three particular best practices have served organizations well in this area: determine the goals you want to achieve, look at what other organizations are doing, and use the right tools. Read on to learn more about putting these best practices to work for you.

What Are Your Goals?

As is true with many technological solutions, you can’t achieve success with ESM unless you know what success looks like. Before implementing the solution, you have to have very clear goals in mind.

Your goals might not look the same as those of other organizations. You might have discovered that you need to improve the way you deliver services internally, or maybe you see it as a way to improve the ROI on your existing ITSM solution. ESM can deliver many benefits to companies, but you need to know what it is you want in order for it to fulfill its promise.

What Are Other Organizations Doing?

Sometimes, it’s helpful to look at what other organizations are doing so you can learn from their mistakes or their successes. The same holds true of ESM.

Assessing what other organizations are doing can also help you develop use cases of your own. Do you see that another firm has successfully put ESM in place to better deliver human resources services? That could be a use case that never occurred to you previously, and yet, could be the perfect fit for your organization.

Use the Right Tools

You will not achieve success with ESM tools if you aren’t using the right kind. What, then, are the right tools?

ITSM thought leader Stephen Mann notes that the “right” kind of ESM solutions are those that accommodate business functions and promises. You won’t get anywhere if you have to force business functions to fit your existing ITSM solution just because you want to implement ESM. When that happens, you’ll not only see a great deal of frustration, but employees will also become creative and find workarounds so they won’t have to use those tools.

“In a 2018 HDI survey, 84% of organizations said they had a service management solution, up from 68% in 2014”

Moreover, the “right” kinds of ESM solutions automate previously manual functions. They make it easier to complete processes rather than creating more work.

Best practices aren’t arbitrarily determined – they come from hard-earned experience. By following previously established best practices, you don’t have to go through the difficulty of learning these lessons on your own; rather, following best practices allows you to reap the success that others have figured out how to achieve. To learn more about enterprise service management, download From ITSM to ESM: The Evolution of the Digital Enterprise.